


Reach Across the Stars

by Woland



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Avengers: Endgame trailer, F/M, Hurt Tony, Hurt Tony Stark, Hurt/Comfort, Pepper Potts Feels, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Protective Nebula, Protective Pepper Potts, Tony Stark Feels, pre-Avengers: Endgame, trailer inspired fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-15 02:57:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16925211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Woland/pseuds/Woland
Summary: Basically, I watched the Av4 trailer and it broke me and now I have to find a way to fix it.  This is my take on what happens both on The Benatar and on Earth and how the two connect.





	1. Chapter 1

The fingers of his right hand slide willlessly off the smooth surface of the helmet, the knuckles thumping weakly against the console, and he collapses back against the seat, spent.  Tired, he’s so, so tired.  That short message has taken what little energy he had left, and now the simple task of breathing seems almost too much.   

 

He had tried, he had tried his goddamn best.  Back on Earth, on Titan, here on the ship.  But it just wasn’t enough.  It never has been.  _He_ never has been… enough. 

 

The Benatar got them about two-thirds of the way to Earth before its fuel supply ran out.  (He can’t blame the Guardians, really – when the fate of the universe hangs in the balance, something so trivial as refueling the ship is hardly a priority.  Besides, from what he’s seen on Titan, there’s no one really left to blame.  Just him.  Always him.)  And now they’re stuck.  Light years away.  No food, no water, no power.  Nothing to do but wait for death.       

 

He lets his head fall back, closes his eyes.  Tries to picture Pepper as he saw her last – weeks, months, a lifetime ago.  Hair disheveled slightly from running, a few strawberry blond strands coming loose from the ponytail, falling to frame her delicate face.  Eyes bright as she smiled at him, radiant and fond.  _Happy_.

 

A sharp metallic clang echoes through the bowels of the dead ship, followed by a string of loud angry words that he’s pretty sure are expletives despite the fact he can’t understand the language they’re spoken in.  Reluctantly he peels his eyes open, rolls his head toward the sound.

 

“Nebula?”

 

His voice is a pathetic little thing barely above a whisper, and it’s no surprise that she doesn’t answer back.  Instead he hears more clanging accompanied by more furious-sounding words.

 

“Neb… ah, forget it.” He waves off his own failed attempt at calling out, braces himself instead.  Rolls forward, planting both hands on the console before him.  Pushes himself up and takes off in the direction of the noise, holding on to the walls for support. 

 

It takes far too long for him to shuffle to the back of the ship where he finds her, huddled over the transmitter that he had tried to enhance using whatever spare parts he could scrounge up in the hopes that it would strengthen the signal from the SOS message they had sent out, make it strong enough to reach Earth or, perhaps, another ship, to reach somebody – _anybody_ – who could help get them out of this starry hell.  He had failed at that, too, of course.  They’ve been floating here for weeks and… nothing. 

 

“What are you doing?” he gasps out, dismayed, as she pops open her cybernetic eye socket, rips the part off completely, wincing in obvious pain, and begins pulling at something inside the intricate mechanism.

 

She spares no glance in his direction, too intent on her task.  Grunts out, “The signal’s too weak.  This,” she pulls out a small intricate piece of circuitry, “will amplify it.  Much better than anything else on this ship.”

 

He shakes his head in denial, instantly regretting the move as the room lurches and swims around him, dark spots invading his vision, and he sags with his back against the wall to keep himself from falling.  Forces himself to take a couple of slow, steady breaths as he waits for the darkness to recede.  “You ca… can’t do that,” he objects past a dry, convulsive swallow.  “You… you need your eye.  This is–”

 

“A necessity,” she cuts him off, working to attach the piece to the wiring of the transmitter.  Adds with cold conviction, “I can do without an eye.  _You_ need to survive.  Your wizard had to have a reason for wanting it so.”

 

“The wizard…”  He chuckles breathlessly, slides heavily down to the floor.  “What did _he_ know.”

 

“He knew enough to trade the Stone for you,” she points out, standing up, now her task complete. 

 

“He made a mistake.”

 

“You don’t believe that.” She shakes her head, steps closer.  “No more than I do.”

 

_Doesn’t he_?  He wonders.  Thinks bitterly back on that fateful fight with the Mad Titan, the grim acceptance of death, the shock of the sudden reprieve, the subsequent helpless torment of despair as everyone around him turned to dust.  Was it worth it? Was _he_ worth it?

 

She squats down before him, reaches out hesitantly, placing her hand on his knee.  “You’ll figure it out, Stark,” she tells him, her one remaining eye boring into him – a bottomless black pool.  “They’ll find us and you’ll figure it out and you’ll help us fix it all.  And when you’re done,” her lips twitch with tired amusement, “you can fix my eye, too.”

 

“Yeah.” He forces a smile of his own in appreciation of her attempt at levity, drops his head in a nod.  It’s too heavy for him to lift it back up again, and the second confirmation is nothing more than a feeble rustle of air that gets lost in the space between them.  “Yeah.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Boss?” FRIDAY’s voice chirps warningly in her ear, and she forces herself not to flinch at the moniker, at the harsh, soul-wrenching feeling of how wrong, _wrong, wrong_ it is. 

 

It’s been months since Tony disappeared, the crackled whisper of his apology fading in her phone’s speaker as the spaceship took him father and father away beyond her reach.  Months since The Snap, when half of all living things turned to dust, plunging cities into chaos and hearts into despair.  Months since she donned the suit Tony had made for her – back when he was with her, back when they were happy, back when they … _were_ – and began helping with the daunting and seemingly unending recovery effort. 

Search, rescue, assist. 

 

Rescue.  If only….

 

She helps secure the wall of a building, while workers pull another body from the wreckage.  A young man, practically a kid, whole life ahead of him.  She flies away when they’re done, moves on to the next task.  She can’t cry.  Not anymore.  She’s run out of tears. 

 

She wants to go home.

 

“Boss,” FRIDAY repeats, pulling her out of the misery of her thoughts.  “There’s an… intruder at the Compound workshop.” 

 

The odd hesitation in the AI’s voice puts her on edge as much as the warning itself.  The Compound is empty, _has been_ for years now save for the maintenance crew that Tony’s kept on staff there to keep the place in shape.  “Just in case,” he had told her once when she asked why he bothered.  And there was so much pain in his eyes when he said it, that she never brought it up again. 

And then Rogers called her out of the blue a few days ago to ask if they could return (apparently, the clean-up effort in whatever hellhole they had been hiding until now has finally been brought under control and they were ready to come offer their services in New York).  And she thought about that haunted look in Tony’s eyes that had never quite gone away after Siberia, about the fading crescent-shaped scar on his chest that had disappeared eventually under the imposing new reactor, about the defeated droop of his shoulders and the pronounced tremble of his hands when he sat outside fiddling with the flip phone as he waited for her to join him on their afternoon jog…. 

 

She told him to drop dead and hung up the phone.

 

Two days later, tired, cried out and slightly drunk, she called him back and told him the Compound was there for them to return to.  It was what Tony had wanted, even hoped for, all along, after all.  The least she could do was honor his wish.

 

Still, the workshop, Tony’s workshop, has always remained off limits and would remain so even after their return. _Especially_ after their return.  She made it clear to them.  So whoever it is that had broken the rule, they were gonna pay dearly for their trespass.

 

She takes off toward the Compound at full speed.  Makes her way down to the workshop, the repulsor aimed and ready.

 

And freezes at the sight of a raccoon-like creature huddled in front of the holoscreen, a partially disassembled mess of wires and circuitry spread out over Tony’s table before him.  _What the hell…?_

“Get out of here, whoever the hell you are,” she demands sharply, the whine of the repulsor punctuating her words.  Because, raccoon or not, no one has any business being here.  No one but Tony.

 

The creature turns toward her, furry face scrunched up in an odd mix of curiosity and frustration.  “No can do, lady,” it responds with a shrug, and, holy mother of god, that thing actually talks.  “I got a ship to find and I hear this place might just have what I need to find it.”

 

She frowns inside the helmet, her gauntleted fingers twitching in indecision.   She had heard reports of alien sightings across the globe, of savage beasts descending from the sky like locust on unsuspecting towns.  The reports were disturbing, the pictures – the stuff of nightmares.  The raccoon-like creature sitting at Tony’s desk, on Tony’s chair, fiddling with Tony’s computer looked nothing like them, didn’t look threatening at all, in fact.  But he is sitting at Tony’s desk….

 

“Get out.”

 

The raccoon sighs, dropping a tool he was fiddling with onto the desk.  Clenches his little paw into a fist. 

 

“Look, lady,” he begins, his voice strained and shaky in a way that only the voice of someone who feels raw, bottomless grief can be, “I had to watch someone I love like a son turn to dust right in front of me and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.  I spent the last few months helping the morons that lost the battle with the purple asshole clean up the mess he left behind.  And now those same morons want me helping them here.  I don’t like helping humans. I don’t even like _humans_!” His voice rises, anger momentarily pushing out the grief. 

Then it drops once more, tired, frustrated.  “The only reason I agreed to come was because the rest of my crew is still up there in space and I heard that this Stark fellow was obsessed with monsters from space and been tracking the skies for years.  Guess he was one of the smarter ones on this backwards planet.”

 

The raccoon huffs in disdain, unaware of the way she flinches at his words.  Because Tony knew, he _knew_.  He tried to tell them, _all of them_ , and they wouldn’t listen!

 

“Look,” the creature starts again, his dark beady eyes startlingly intense, sincere, “I’m sorry I broke in, but I figured Stark might just have the technology I need to find my ship.  And I really, really need to find them. I got my pod here.  As soon as I find them, I’ll be out of this room and off this planet, I swear.  So, please, just… just let me try.” The last part is a barely audible whisper, a cracked plea.

 

She lowers her gauntleted arm, lets her helmet fold away – a small show of trust.  “How?”

 

“I hacked into his tracking program,” the raccoon explains, already turning back toward the monitor, his clawed fingers clacking frantically on the smooth surface of the keyboard.  “All I need to do is modify the program to track for a specific signal and … voilà!”

 

The holoscreen comes alive with images of stars and strings and strings of data, rushing past faster than she can register them. They mean nothing to her, but the raccoon stares at them intently, paws gripping the edges of the desk, his little body virtually vibrating with tension.  She wonders dimly if any of those stars are where Tony is now, where he was when The Snap happened, where he…

 

“I’m picking up an SOS message at the targeted frequency,” FRIDAY pipes up suddenly, startling them both.

 

The raccoon swivels back toward her, dark eyes pleading. “It might be them.  My team.”

 

She nods, acquiescing. “Play it, FRIDAY.”

 

The speakers crackle obediently, the room filling with static.  And then a voice breaks through, faint and distorted and so, so familiar that she has to suck in a panicked, convulsive breath because she suddenly finds herself without air. 

 

_Tony_

 

“…’ship The Benatar…  we’re… ‘randed about… years from Earth….”

 

_Tony_

“…’nd water … oxygen… ‘ning out…”

 

_Tony…_

“…we need… ‘stance… ‘ship The Benatar… we’re…”

 

Her knees wobble and she is suddenly absurdly glad that she’s got the suit on, because without it she’d have already been on the floor.  As it is, she takes a heavy, mechanical step forward, closer to the monitor where a single blue dot is now flashing in the middle of the screen – the ship, _Tony_.  Grips the edge of the desk, feeling the metal bend under the impossible pressure.

 

“You… you said you have a pod,” she manages, turning sharply to the raccoon who finishes writing down the coordinates and scrambles to hop off the chair.   

 

The creature blinks up at her, eyes wide with grim understanding.  “That your man?”

 

She nods, grips the desk harder.  “The pod?” she demands again.

 

The raccoon considers her a beat longer, shrugs, imitating her earlier show of reluctant permission.  “Fine, Suit Lady. Let’s go save us some castaways.” 

 

“Pepper,” she corrects him as they rush toward the exit.

 

“Rocket,” he grumbles back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> check out my tumblr @somethingjustsouthofbrilliance.tumblr.com


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter after this. I think 😬

It’s cold inside the ship.  Getting colder every minute, it seems.  Enough so that she can see the white vapor of her breath every time she exhales.  It doesn’t really bother her much, the cold.  She can take worse.  Much, much worse.  Her body is more machine now than flesh, and things like cold, thirst, hunger are not much of a concern.  

 

But the human, _Stark_ , is not faring so well. The lack of sustenance and the cold seemed to have sapped every last bit of energy he had, and all he does lately is sit over by the window and look at the stars outside, the occasional weak shivers that wrack his gaunt frame and that same faint cloud of vapor in front of his face – the only signs that he’s still alive.

 

It riles her, how quickly he declined, the defeat in his posture, in his eyes, in the raspy, barely there voice when he manages to speak.  It’s a show of weakness, and she was raised to be intolerant of it, to spurn its every sign.  Only…

 

Only Stark isn’t weak, is he.  She saw how he fought, throwing every bit of himself into the battle.  She saw him with his head held high in the face of certain death. Saw him pull himself together despite his injuries, despite the loss he suffered… 

 

No, Stark is far from weak.  He’s a warrior, stronger in spirit than most she’d seen.  She respects him.  She… _likes_ him, even though she finds the very notion of such sentiment abhorrent. 

And she’s furious as she watches his body betray him now, making him waste away, making him break when nothing else could. She takes that betrayal personally, to an extent that surprises even herself.  It makes her want to lash out, for some reason. To snap something, to make someone pay. 

 

But there’s no one.  Just a dying human in a dead ship and the cosmos, cold and indifferent around them.    

 

She shakes her head forcefully, dismissing the fruitless anger from her thoughts.  Growls her frustration low in her throat, tightening her hold on the two items she managed to dig up in the storage compartment at the back of the ship.

 

She doesn’t call out as she approaches.  Simply squats down beside him in silence, sets her items on the ground.

 

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they, the stars,” Stark murmurs suddenly, his voice breathy and faint, punctuated by the labored wheeze of inhales.  “I used to… used to be afraid of them, you know.”  He rolls his head toward her, his bluish lips twitching into a bitter, self-deprecating smile.  His gaze drops, lost somewhere in the maze of his own memories – unpleasant, if the light furrow of his brow is anything to go by. “So afraid,” he echoes absently, and she doesn’t even know if he’s talking to her still, if in his mind he’s even here on this ship.

 

She opens her mouth to speak, to ask him what it is he’s seeing in the blankness of the empty hallway behind her, but just then he blinks, jerks his head to the side, forcefully coming back into the present.  Smiles at her, apologetic, before turning his gaze back toward the stars outside.

 

“Beautiful,” he repeats with a raspy sigh.  “Peaceful...”

 

The sheer amount of melancholy acceptance in his voice makes her skin itch. 

 

“Save your breath, Stark,” she grumbles, picking up the thermal blanket she brought with her and wrapping it around his bony, shivering frame. 

 

He startles when she manhandles him briefly away from the bulkhead to thread the blanket between his back and the cold metal.  Looks up at her, a silent question in the wide-eyed, vulnerably open stare.  Wary, confused, disbelieving.  Like an abused animal that’s suddenly given a sign of affection.   

 

She knows that stare all too well. 

 

She wonders, not for the first time, just how similar the two of them are.  Wonders if on the inside this human is just as broken, just as mutilated as she is.  Wonders, too, who it was that had scarred him so. 

 

“You’re cold,” she responds to his silent inquiry, huffing with feigned irritation at his sincerely whispered thanks.

 

She reaches for the second item beside her, her most prized discovery – an oxygen mask and a portable oxygen container. 

 

“Here,” she holds it up for him to see.  “They use these when they need to make outside repairs.  There were more in the storage, but the other tanks are all empty.  This one,” she flicks her fingers at the gauge, “has about 7 hours worth of oxygen left.  If you decrease the flow rate, you can make it last longer.”

 

It’s not ideal, she knows.  Unless rescue comes in the next 10 hours or so, all she’s doing is prolonging the inevitable.  But the wizard saw the possible future outcomes and he sacrificed a stone for this man.  So she has to believe that fate has more in store for him than a slow, inglorious suffocation in space.  She has to believe that their signal was heard and rescue will be here soon.  And she can do her part in keeping him alive until then.

 

She moves to place the mask on his face and frowns in confusion when he puts his hand on her arm, staying her movement.

 

“Save it… for you,” he insists, pushing her arm back. 

 

He’s a human.  Outside his battle suit he is no match for her on a good day.  And now, with his strength all sapped away by lack of air and food, he’s weaker than a newborn Groot.  She can keep going, can dislodge his grip with no more effort than it takes her to swat away a fly.

 

But she doesn’t want to hurt him.

 

“My body doesn’t need as much,” she points out instead, trying to make him see the rationale behind this.  “I can last much longer than you.”  Because the new signal is strong, she’s sure of it. Somebody is bound to have picked it up.  Help might be mere hours away.

 

Her appeal to logic doesn’t work the way she’d hoped.

 

He huffs – a breathless cross between a laugh and a wheeze.  “Then this… should last you… enough.”

 

“Don’t be stupid,” she mutters, baring her teeth in helpless, irrational anger.  Because this isn’t how things are supposed to go.  People don’t reject an offer to save them.  Not for the sake of another.  Not for the sake of _her_. 

 

She pushes now, forgetting her earlier decision to treat him gently.  Brings the mask closer to his face, despite his attempt to stop her. 

 

“You need to breathe,” she snaps.  “Let me help!”

 

He shakes his head minutely, raises his hand higher, weak, trembling fingers tracing the edges of the ugly gaping hole where her cybernetic eye plate used to be.  Gently, reverently. 

 

“You’ve… already done… too … much…,” he murmurs, cracked, blue-tinged lips pulling into a soft, rueful smile.

 

She freezes.  Stares wildly at him out of her one remaining eye as everything in her body – flesh and machine – grinds to a stunned, screeching halt. 

Stark’s fingers are cold as ice, but his touch is like a press of burning embers against her skin.  It sears right through her, melts her at her very core.

 

She isn’t used to physical kindness.  Doesn’t know what to do with it.  Doesn’t know how to react.

 

Gamora was the only other person who ever touched her like that – with that same gentleness, that foreign but uncomfortably pleasant intent to comfort.   And the two of them spent years trying to kill each other before that happened; before they decided to unite in their common hatred of Thanos and become sisters for real, to rekindle the fledgling bond of affection they had lost when they were little kids. 

And this man, this man is a stranger to her.  He doesn’t owe her the kindness she had craved from her sister all her life.  His gentleness is… illogical.  She can’t understand it.  It scares her. It doesn’t… it doesn’t make sense.   

 

Stark’s brow furrows in confusion as he considers her, rigid and spooked before him.  But then his face clears in understanding, warm brown eyes crinkling with empathetic regret.  His feather-light touch lingers a fraction of a heartbeat longer, as if he were trying to impart something to her, to soothe like one would a wounded, frightened animal.  And then his hand falls away, his eyes slipping shut, as his body begins to careen limply to the side.

 

The abrupt loss of the searing contact snaps her out of her stupor, and she grabs for him before he hits the floor.  Settles him back upright, a little too eagerly, a little too rough.

 

“Foolish human,” she growls, angry without even fully understanding why.  Slaps the oxygen mask over his slack face, silently commanding him to _“breathe, you idiot, breathe, breathe, breathe!”_   And sags, almost dizzy with relief, as she sees his worriedly still chest begin to rise and fall in small, halting swells.

 

Carefully, she tightens the straps at the back of his head, adjusts the oxygen flow on the tank to extend its supply as much as possible while still keeping the human alive.  Sits down beside him, shouldering his unconscious weight.

 

The stars outside the window shimmer silently – cold apathetic witnesses to their plight.  How Stark finds them beautiful, she’ll never understand. 

 

She tears her gaze away, rests her head against the bulkhead, closing her eye against the depressing scene.

 

“They’ll find us, Stark,” she murmurs, even though she doubts her only companion can hear her now. “They’ll find us, you’ll see.”


	4. Chapter 4

_\--“I love you, I’m lucky.”--_

She sits cross-legged on the floor of the space pod behind the backs of the crew seats, propped uncomfortably against the bulkhead.  Tries not to think about how alluring, how prohibitively soft and cozy they appear from her current position. It’s pointless to indulge in such thoughts – she won’t be moving from where she is now any time soon.  Because where she is now is the only place wide enough in this cramped little pod where she could sit down with Tony cradled securely in her armored embrace, and she is not about to allow herself to be parted from him. Not after everything. Not anymore.

 

She had retracted the armor the moment they settled down, gently tightening her hold on Tony when his unconscious form slipped further into her embrace once the additional bulk of the armor was gone.  She needed to touch him, to feel him solid and alive against her skin.  But he feels so cold, so cold. 

 

She hoists him up higher in her lap, trying to be as gentle as she possibly can, terrified that she would hurt him, would break him somehow.  Because he looks so fragile, so thin – ethereal almost, like he could disappear at any moment, could crumble to stardust in her arms. 

 

The thought makes her shiver, and she cocoons her body around him as if to shield him from the universe itself, to give him as much of her warmth as she can, ignoring the way her back twinges in protest. 

 

He still feels cold.

 

_\--“…lucky.”--_

 

She thought they were too late.  When they stepped inside that spaceship – that cold, airless tomb, a black void of death amidst the apathetic, starry beauty of the cosmos, she thought they were too late.

 

And then she saw him – ghostly pale and lifeless, slumped ragdoll-like against a blue-skinned one-eyed woman, and she became convinced that they were.

 

But then the woman moved, sensing their approach, shifted as though to protect him, and a new rush of hope made Pepper’s knees go weak.

 

“His oxygen is almost out,” the woman rasped, when Pepper dropped down beside him, retracting her gauntlets and helmet despite the urgent flash of warning on the HUD. 

 

She could handle a few moments without oxygen.  She wanted to see with her own eyes the feeble rise and fall of his chest.  She wanted to touch his face.   She wanted… she needed… she…

 

“You need to hurry.”

 

_Yes, that._

Gingerly she slipped her arms under Tony, pulling him in, pulling him up with her.  Moved to rush back toward the pod.

 

“My team?” Rocket’s sudden, desperation tinged growl stopped her in her tracks.

 

_Oh no…_

She watched the woman stumble weakly to her feet, one hand braced on the bulkhead.  Watched her shake her head with an expression of muted regret.  “Dust,” she said, her voice as hollow as the look in her eye.  Then her expression twisted, morphing into something uglier, something deadly.  “Except Gamora.  He killed Gamora.”

 

The raccoon stiffened, eyes wide, mouth opening and closing in quick, convulsive bursts. And then sound burst through – an awful keening noise that echoed through the empty bowels of the ship like a death knell, making the darkness slither in closer, its icy breath seeming to filter past the suit’s defenses, making her shiver.

 

“Rocket,” she begged, forcing herself not to flinch away from him as he turned his grief-blackened eyes toward her, his little body trembling with the force of emotions that she understood all too well.  “Please, we gotta go. Let’s go.”

 

“We need to get the Terran home,” the blue-skinned woman broke in, impassive, startling them both, and Pepper watched in growing apprehension as the woman staggered a few steps to the nearby console to pick up an all-too-familiar helmet before addressing them both again in the same robotic tone. “He’s key to bringing everyone else back.”

 

Something about her words, something about the way she said it made Pepper tug Tony even closer to her chest, fighting the urge to run away from them both.

 

Rocket’s gaze snapped to her then, drawn by her involuntary movement, black eyes narrowing on Tony’s limp form cocooned in her armored grasp, the furry face twisting into an ugly resentful sneer.  “Lucky you,” he spat out, raising his gaze toward her.  “Lucky you.” 

 

_\--“…lucky.”--_

 

She feels a shudder run through him, his gaunt chest spasming as if he’s suddenly running out of air, and she checks the gauge frantically, checks his mask.  But it’s not that, it’s not that.  And when she sees the way his eyes move behind closed lids, the way his face twists even in the unconsciousness that passes for sleep, she understands.

Carefully, she unwraps one arm from around his chest, moves it to run gentle fingers through his hair, matted with sweat and dried blood.

 

“Hush,” she shushes him, leaning in to place a quick kiss on the too-too cold skin of his brow. Ghosts her fingertips over the haggard hollow of his cheek.  “You’re safe now, you’ll be okay.  It’ll all be okay.”

 

She keeps up her mantra, whispering the soothing empty promises in his ear until he calms, the lines of his face softening, smoothing out, his breathing relaxing once more.  She lets herself relax, too, then.  Lets her forehead thump lightly against his, exhaling a soft sigh of relief, and almost allows herself to believe her own words.

 

Later, when they are back on Earth, she will sit at his bedside in the partially restored medical wing, watching him slowly get stronger, and she will think about the message he left her when he feared that he would never see her again, will think about how close that fear came to be, how close she came to losing him this time, how she might lose him still when all is said and done, when he gets strong enough to do what everyone expects of him to make things right. 

Later, when they are back at home, and a nightmare rips him out of his uneasy sleep and he jackknifes in bed beside her, a gasping scream echoing between the empty walls of their bedroom, his still too thin chest heaving with the force of it, she will wrap her arms around his trembling form, unafraid of the way he startles within her grasp, his body growing tense like a string about to snap.  And she will hold him, whispering softly to him until that snap-ready tension begins to leach away, until the awful blackness in the unseeing pools of his eyes fades and he blinks, slowly, laboriously, coming back into the present.  Until he crumples, sagging bonelessly into her embrace.  And she will hold him, as tight as she dares, as he trembles against her, his body wracked by silent agonizing sobs.  Hold him until he falls back into the exhausted sleep, his face still tucked against the side of her neck.  And only then will she notice that she is crying, too, her own tears making new tracks on her skin where his have just begun to dry.  And she will wonder, as she watches his uneasy repose, her own sleep now refusing to come, if he will ever truly come back to her, if part of him will be forever lost somewhere amid that cold macabre beauty of space.

 

But for now as she watches him settle trustingly in her arms, watches his chest rise and fall at a steady reassuring rhythm, she thinks back to Rocket’s anguished reproach and she selfishly finds herself agreeing with the raccoon.

 

“I love you,” she whispers, pressing another gentle kiss over the fading scar on his cheek.  “I’m lucky.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> follow me on tumblr @somethingjustsouthofbrilliance.tumblr.com


End file.
